WATT Digest 2007, Issue 1 Date Issued : April 2007 =============================================================== Welcome to the WATT NewsLetter for the Working Group on Automated Timetabling (http://www.asap.cs.nott.ac.uk/watt/index.html). WATT Digest is alive again, and will appear roughly every 3 months. It is automatically sent to all members of WATT. Back issues of WATT digest can be viewed at http://www.asap.cs.nott.ac.uk/watt/index.html If you wish to subscribe/unsubscribe to WATT you should EMAIL Rong Qu rxq@cs.nott.ac.uk The WATT website can be found at http://www.asap.cs.nott.ac.uk/ASAP/watt/index.html Contents of this issue (#2007-01) 1. New Editor of WATT Digest 2. New Co-ordinator of WATT 3. Application Areas 4. WATT Workshop at EURO XXII 5. MISTA 2007 6. OR49 7. IFORS 2008 8. Contact Details 1. New Editor of WATT Digest 1. John Woodward is taking over from Gareth Beddoe as editor of the WATT Digest. I would like to encourage anyone with new ideas for the content of this digest to get in touch. Please let me know about any subject related to timetabling that you think may be of interest to the timetabling community, including, but not restricted to: - Upcoming conferences and workshops - Review (or list) of recent papers, book chapters, etc. Apart from titles it would be also useful to have abstracts of these articles. - Special issues of journals - Reports on PhD thesis that you completed or are currently working on - Calls for research proposals of interest - Details about software packages - Vacancies for PhD or post-doctoral positions - Links to useful sites, relevant datasets, etc. If you know of anyone who might be interested in joining the WATT community then point them to the WATT website at http://www.asap.cs.nott.ac.uk/watt/. Submissions, articles and suggestions for content should now be sent to my EMAIL jrw@cs.nott.ac.uk. 2. New Co-ordinator of WATT Sanja Petrovic is taking over from Edmund Burke the role of a co-ordinator of the WATT. Special thanks go to Edmund for all his hard work and for organising and managing WATT so well. Jan Schreuder will continue to act as a co-ordinator and the treasurer of the group. 3. Application Areas Four application areas sites will be set on our Web pages: Educational Timetabling, Employee Timetabling, Transportation Timetabling and Sport Timetabling; Rong Qu, Gerard Post, Raymond Kwan, and Jan Schreuder are appointed administrators of these Web sites, respectively. 4. WATT Workshop at EURO XXII A WATT workshop will take place within EURO XXII, the 22nd European Conference on Operational Research, to be held in Prague, Czech Republic from July 8 to July 11, 2007. There are a number of streams on timetabling. The submission dates for these are now closed. The streams with contact details are: "Timetabling and Rostering"; Dario Landa Silva jds@cs.nott.ac.uk or Hana Rudova hanka@fi.muni.cz. "Educational Timetabling"; Sophia Daskalaki sdask@upatras.gr "Health care decision support" Greet Vanden Berghe greet.vandenberghe@kahosl.be More information about the EURO XXII conference can be found at http://euro2007.vse.cz/. Here is the Web page of EURO: http://www.euro-online.org/. 5. MISTA 2007 The 3rd Multi Disciplinary International Scheduling Conference: Theory and Applications, MISTA 2007, will take place in Paris, France August 28-31, 2007. The submission deadline is now passed, but you can still register for the conference. More information at http://www.mistaconference.org/2007/index.html 6. OR49 The Annual Conference of the UK Operational Research Society will be held in Edinburgh, at the Edinburgh University, UK, September 4th to 6th, 2007. A Scheduling Stream is organised by Jonathan Thompson You are invited to submit an abstract to present a paper during the scheduling stream at the primary annual British OR conference, OR49. The scheduling stream uses the widest possible definition of scheduling and includes themes such as educational scheduling, transportation planning, employee rostering, sports scheduling, all forms of timetabling, shop floor scheduling, vehicle routing etc. All kinds of papers are welcome whether they are purely theoretical or practical case studies. Solution methods may vary from exact solution methods, heuristics or hybrids. Implementation issues will also be of interest. Keynote There is an opportunity for each stream to have a keynote paper. This would be a 'state of the art, future directions' paper normally having a one hour slot and accessible to non-specialists. These keynotes can be published in a conference booklet if the speaker produces a written version. If you are interested in producing the keynote address, please contact me directly (my e-mail address is at the bottom of this message). Interested in presenting a paper? You do not have to produce a written paper for the conference - a 'paper' at the conference means approximately 20 minutes for a presentation plus 5 minutes for questions/discussion. If you have some ideas and would like to try them out on someone before committing to a paper, please feel free to contact the organiser of this stream details below). Submitting an abstract You may submit your abstract on-line via the OR Society's website at: http://www.theorsociety.com - in the Conferences section, under OR49. Here you can enter your details and specify which stream you wish to join (our stream is called 'Scheduling'). Abstracts are required ASAP. Alternatively, you may contact the co-ordinator of the Scheduling Stream: Dr Jonathan Thompson Tel: 029 20875524 School of Mathematics, Cardiff University e-mail: ThompsonJM1@cardiff.ac.uk 7. IFORS 2008 The 18th Conference of the International Federation of Operations Research (IFORS), hosted by the Operations Research Society of South Africa (ORSSA), will be held in South Africa during 14 -18 July 2008. The conference theme is on Developing communities and managing the connections between them. Submission Closes 15 December 2007. 8. Special Issue of Journal of Scheduling  Special Issue of Journal of Scheduling     Artificial Intelligence Planning and Scheduling      http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~rxq/JoSHspecial.htm      Guest editors: Rong Qu, Derek Long and Maria Fox =============================================================== The Journal of Scheduling invites researchers in planning and scheduling to submit papers to the Special Issue on "Artificial Intelligence Planning and Scheduling". We especially aim to bring together research at the interface between the AI planning and OR scheduling. SCOPE Topics of interest include (but are not limited to): - Novel planning and scheduling algorithms - Constraint-based planning/scheduling and control techniques - Empirical studies of planning/scheduling systems - Integration of planning and scheduling in autonomous systems - Reasoning about knowledge, action, and time for planning and scheduling - Case-based planning/scheduling - Iterative improvement techniques for scheduling and/or planning - Artificial intelligence and operations research applied to scheduling and/or planning - Planning/scheduling under uncertainty - Management of resources through integrated planning and scheduling - Exploration of the interaction between planning and scheduling SUBMISSIONS Papers should be submitted electronically via Journal of Scheduling's online submission system at http://www.editorialmanager.com/josh/, following the journal's instructions to authors. Please indicate that your submission is to the Special Issue on "Artificial Intelligence Planning and Scheduling". All papers submitted to the special issue will be reviewed in accordance with the standard procedures of the Journal of Scheduling. IMPORTANT DATES Paper submission due:             4th May 2007 Notification of acceptance:        7th Sept 2007 Final manuscript due:            14th Dec 2007 Please contact the guest editors with any queries. Dr Rong Qu rxq@cs.nott.ac.uk Dr Derek Derek.Long@cis.strath.ac.uk Professor Maria Fox Maria.Fox@cis.strath.ac.uk 9. Contact Details WATT Digest is edited by: John Woodward Automated Scheduling Optimisation and Planning Research Group School of Computer Science and Information Technology University of Nottingham Jubilee Campus, Wollaton Road Nottingham NG8 1BB United Kingdom Tel : +44 (0) 115 8466531 http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~jrw